


The Pleasures of Insomnia

by Riffir



Series: Polyphasic [3]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: M/M, extremely mild d/s issues, mild food kink, polyphasic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-26
Updated: 2012-01-26
Packaged: 2017-10-30 04:14:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,375
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/327605
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Riffir/pseuds/Riffir
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Living with Sick Sherlock is Hell, but living with a Sherlock set upon fixing his polyphasic sleep schedule is somewhat akin to attempting to overthrow both Heaven and Hell armed with nothing but three plastic spoons and a rabbit.  Or it was at least impossibly louder.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Pleasures of Insomnia

**Author's Note:**

> Am neither Uberman schedule polyphasic nor is my partner.

By now, even a person as dull as John is able to place Sherlock’s moods into a couple of distinct categories. There’s Bored Sherlock, who shoots walls, drips venom from every pore of his being, and once tried to set John’s chair on fire “for an experiment.” There’s Case Sherlock, which is the closest that John thinks he will ever see Sherlock being truly happy. There’s Uncomfortable Sherlock (John secretly wants to rename this one Adorable Sherlock, as he imagines that this look is Sherlockian for vulnerability), whom John had become more familiar with after they had become lovers. Sometime there’s Apologetic Sherlock, which looks an awful lot like Uncomfortable/Adorable Sherlock in that apologizing is obviously something that Sherlock has never really had to do before, and he usually looks like some sort of clichéd submissive (a look which John secretly and rather fervently wants to see again in their bedroom). And now there is Sleeping Sherlock, who is infinitely preferred to Bored Sherlock, especially after two weeks of no cases. 

But Sick Sherlock is the worst of the admittedly bad lot (because although John loves Sherlock, he will never make the mistake of saying that living with a manic genius man-child is easy). Nothing that John can think of from medical school, or years of doting on sick partners or even what he can pull up from the internet seems to make Sherlock feel like John’s an adequate caregiver. The blankets that John pulls out of storage to help warm him up are thrown on the floor. Glasses of water are downed, then tossed carelessly aside. Tissues are shoved in the crevice of the couch, no matter how many bins are spread about the place. And that’s nothing on the pure abuse that is croaked from Sherlock’s obviously tortured throat. He insults everything from John’s tea to the idiots who gave him his medical degree, to the complete boredom that being sick inflicts upon him and the lack of anything good on the television. 

Living with Sherlock is hard. Living with Sick Sherlock is Hell.

John tries throughout the day to grit his teeth and bear it. He makes cups of untouched tea, supplies plenty of lemsip and vapor rub, and does his best to pretend that Sherlock is both mute and immobile. He succeeds remarkably well, until Sherlock, red-faced and miserable, flings the remote control at the telly with pinpoint precision. Which is a lot less impressive, when one realizes that the “pinpoint” is the entire thirty-two inches that make up their flat screen television.

The remote leaves a jagged smear of blackness in a now silvered screen, with cracks that run to the far edges of the television. 

“Oh, yes, mourn it’s loss. It’s the only thing in the room you’re capable of understanding.” And with a dramatic flip and twist, Sherlock curls up, facing the back of the couch. 

It’s at this moment that John realizes contemplating the murder of one’s patient is usually the biggest sign that one should remove his or herself from the room. He grabs his coat and heads out, resolutely ignoring the pretzeled figure staring at him as he goes.

He spends a few hours at the pub, has a pint or two, and eats horrible fried food before guilt starts to kick in. It’s started to rain, the wind bitter and cold. John stops by the chemist and grabs some more cold medicine on the way back. He can’t remember what brand Sherlock had stocked up on before, and so he grabs whatever looks best.

Sherlock is nowhere in sight, though clear signs of his convalescence can be seen throughout the living room and kitchen. John sighs, picks up the discarded tissues and overturned mugs, uprights the kettle and closes the refrigerator door, turns the thermostat down from the searing 42 degrees, closes the windows, then heads upstairs to see if Sherlock had turned his near violent misery on John’s room as well. 

It’s empty upstairs. John is torn between going downstairs to check on Sherlock, or crawling under his comforter and ending this day as is. Sadly enough, it’s the time which decides it for him, It’s only a few minutes past ten: Sherlock would be asleep for his twenty minute nap. John could check him over, gauge his temperature with the ear thermometer, and put a glass of water and some medicine on the bedside table for when he woke up (if he needed it). And he could do it all in blessed, sweet silence.

A few hours later, John wakes to the pressure of a body sliding into bed behind him. He flinches, hard, disoriented for a moment before he recognizes Sherlock’s voice, speaking rapidly.

“I’m sorry, sorry, I know I’m hard to live with, I don’t really mean it, please don’t leave--”

“What?” John squirms around, tries to pull back far enough to get a glance at Sherlock’s face. Even in the dim lighting, he can see damp skin and glazed eyes, and that’s enough to kick John’s brain to into gear. “No, wait, it’s fine. I’m not going anywhere,” he says as he tries to sit up enough to reach the thermometer located in his drawer. Sherlock’s arms tighten about his ribs, and John pets his forehead, cursing silently at the heat found there. He gently presses the thermometer into Sherlock’s left ear.

It’s high. Too high. John swears again and reaches for his mobile. 

~~~

Luckily, Sherlock’s fever is brought down easily. Unluckily, Sherlock is heavily sedated before long. The doctors and nurses involved will say there was nothing unlucky about it, and that it had either been an injection of sleepy juice or a quick trip out the window. They, however, do not live with a polyphasic, easily-bored idiot.

The first night is lovely. Sherlock is still coming off the anesthesia, and is woozy enough that he ends up passed out on the couch before the news had come to the first commercial break. John simply covers him up with a blanket, turns off the lights, and heads up to his own room. Sherlock had been far enough gone to drool all over John’s thigh, chances were that he wouldn’t wake up if he wanted to.

The next evening is less pleasant. Sherlock is basically over the anesthesia, though the cold is still lingering on, and is completely set upon reorganizing his sleep schedule. He sets three alarms with varying annoyingly loud ringers, but in all it feels like a normal night in Baker St, with the exception that Sherlock is still speaking through blockage in his nose and seems to want to cover his prized smiley face with staples for absolutely no reason at all (“Of course it’s not for a case, John. What sort of idiot clue is staples?”).

It’s not until the third day that things get bad. John had had a small preview after the incident with The Woman and her surprise injection, but Sherlock hadn’t been sick as well then. Now, he appears to be functioning on will alone, never sitting down while asleep, performing non-challenging experiments, cursing the telly twice as often while simultaneously playing his violin and a book on tape read by a particularly angry Russian man who seemed to suffer from Tourettes. He would text John twenty times an hour, and usually leave instructions to call at a certain time to make sure he had woken up

The first twenty times, John had been more than happy to do so, and had responded with an “of course.” The one time John had been unable to had come close to starting World War Three.

John was familiar with the noise that Sherlock made. He’s been awakened by pure sound before, had come home to gunshots, listened to and suffered under the verbal abuse that went for ordinary correspondence with Sherlock. But, usually, the noise at least stopped for a short period of time. This is unending, unsteady noise.

Living with Sick Sherlock may have been Hell, but living with a Sherlock set upon fixing his polyphasic sleep schedule is somewhat akin to attempting to overthrow both Heaven and Hell armed with nothing but three plastic spoons and a rabbit. Or it was at least impossibly louder. It’s even beginning to affect John’s sleep, as well as what vestiges of his sanity that remain. 

After a week he calls Mycroft and asks him to soundproof the rest of the flat. It’s amazing that Mrs. Hudson hasn’t evicted them (because sound proof or not, the door is open nearly twenty-four hours a day). Sherlock takes this as expected: he accuses John of betraying him and shuts himself away in his bedroom for the next two days. The only notice that he’s even home is the constant sound that seeps under his door, pausing only for his twenty minute naps.

Usually, this withdrawal is a sign of a black mood coming on, and John pulls out every stop he can think of to head it off. He makes Sherlock’s favorite foods, finds puzzles to solve, buys the latest medical journal with some obscure strange procedure and offers a challenge to see how many ways the procedure could kill a man and still look like a freak accident. Unfortunately, John’s already run the gamut of distractions by this time. He’s even offered sex, only to be turned down because Sherlock didn’t need extra prolactin to make this any more difficult, thank you kindly you ordinary little man. This time, John lets him sulk. He knows he should do something, that Sherlock is probably just as miserable as he was when his cold was in full swing, but John’s only human, and an average one at that.

The fact is that John needs sleep. He works part time at a job that requires him to not only be awake but deal with physical ailments that range from hospital grade illnesses to hypochondria. There are small children and crying and snot and he knows if he tries to explain this it would sound like whinging, even to himself.

When Sherlock finally appears, he first disappears again up the stairs and into the bathroom. John, seated in his chair, listens for the sound of the pipes rumbling on, and returns to his paper. Twenty minutes later footsteps are thumping down the stairs and Sherlock appears in the door, hair towel dried and tousled and not a stitch of clothes to be found.

It’s been two weeks since John has seen him naked and he instantly lowers his paper, glancing over the too-thin body with the eyes of both doctor and lover. Sherlock had lost a few pounds, which he could scarcely afford to do, but he was still lean and strong and striding over to John with the gait of a person who was interested in one thing only. John tips his head back so he can look at Sherlock’s face, and intends to say something promiscuous or lewd. Instead, “you should eat something,” tumbles out from between his lips. 

Sherlock rolls his eyes. “I’m perfectly capable of waiting a bit longer-- I’m not going to die of malnutrition in the next half-hour.” His voice is clear and deep, all traces of the cold gone. He picks up the paper and discards it onto the coffee table before straddling John’s lap. “I am, however, disinclined to wait for this.”

His throat is right at eye level, pale and unmarked. John brushes his lips against the skin, drags his tongue along Sherlock’s pulse point, and considers as Sherlock sighs above him. “If you could be persuaded to wait another five minutes, then I think we can come to an agreement,” he says, rather than saying what he should, that Sherlock needs a bowl of soup and a sandwich and then John would be happy to fuck him through the couch.

Sherlock pulls back out of range and studies him. John doesn’t bother for innocent or misleading-- instead, he simply raises an eyebrow. Finally Sherlock shrugs and stands. “If you want, then hurry up.”

John rises and gently turns Sherlock toward the bedroom. Like every genius before him, he manages not to point out that he’s been waiting for over a week now. Arguments were not always fuel for the libido. “Is your bedroom safe?” John asks as he steers Sherlock toward the room. “I mean, were you doing anything particularly unsanitary in there?”

“Oh, please. I was recovering from a cold, not experimenting with the effects of microbiotic cultures on my bed sheets.”

In all, John couldn’t see much of a difference. He traces Sherlock’s ear with his tongue and smacks him gently across the arse with the flat of his hand. It’s not even sharp enough to make him flinch, though a distinct shudder makes its way up Sherlock’s spine. “Go ahead and get comfortable. I’ll be right back.”

Sherlock disappears into his bedroom and John hurries into the kitchen, unbuttoning his shirt and abandoning it across one of the chairs. There is fruit in the fridge, and some pieces of chocolate from when John had gone shopping earlier (ironically, there is also some caramel syrup, but Sherlock had been using for some case or another and John really didn’t want to bring a potential murder weapon into their bed any more often than necessary). He really wants to bring something with protein into the room, but there seems to be something decidedly unsexy about shoving a bit of sandwich into someone’s mouth (or perhaps he wasn’t thinking of it correctly; he’d try doing a romantic dinner in bed sometime and explore). 

Finally, he has all the supplies he thinks he can use. John returns to the room. Sherlock is lounging against his pillows, long legs crossed at the ankles and hands tucked behind his head. He looks supremely at ease, even if it’s belied by the waxing erection between two coarsely-haired thighs. John displays his findings, and receives a disdainful look. “Strawberries? Really, how pedantic can you be?”

In the early days of their relationship, John would have taken offense to this. It would have led to a fight, they would have stalked off, and sex would have been a distant concept while John became overly familiar with his left hand. Now, he can see the dim light of dull interest in the back of Sherlock’s eyes. “Sometimes you have to rely on the classics.” He climbs up onto the bed and straddles Sherlock’s thighs, nestling his denim-clad groin up next to Sherlock’s erection, and picks up one of the frozen strawberries. “Keep you hands on your head and suck,” he whispers. 

Sherlock’s lips quirk upwards before closing around the proffered frozen fruit. He looks mildly interested, which isn’t nearly enough. John lowers his head to Sherlock’s throat again, feeling the muscles move beneath the skin. He nips and traces his way down past the collarbone to the flat plane of Sherlock’s chest, then takes a nipple into his mouth, teasing it into a hard bud. Above, he can hear the quiet moan of appreciation. He blows on the nipple, earning a squirm, then reaches for another strawberry.

This time Sherlock arches off the bed, hands separating from his head but not lowering to the bed or reaching for John. John pulls back. “Hands.” Sherlock stares at him, lust and surprise warring for space across his face before he slowly reattaches his hands to his hair, twining the curls around his fingers. John nods. “Good,” he croons before lowering his head and the fruit again. This time he circles around the spit warmed nipple, watching Sherlock squirm and shiver beneath him. 

It’s exquisite, seeing what stimulus does to a human body. When the strawberry thaws enough for Sherlock to eat, John replaces it with a piece of chocolate and pops a piece of fruit into his own mouth. He traces melted cocoa down Sherlock’s abdomen and licks it off while caressing the cleft of his arse. When Sherlock’s eaten the chocolate and is begging for more contact, John chews his way through what’s left of the frozen treat in his mouth and envelops Sherlock’s erection in one smooth move. The combination of cold and heat on the most sensitive part of his body has Sherlock gasping and keening, hands twisting and clenching against his temple. 

John only pulls back when he can feel Sherlock’s cock begin to swell up, with the precome dripping from the head begins to thicken. Sherlock moans, arousal and full want making his voice hoarse, and John reaches for the lube that they keep in the bedside table. He wants to fuck Sherlock, wants him flat on his back with his knees at John’s ears. 

Sherlock, for once, appears to be in full accordance with his plans. He spreads his legs, pulling his knees up to his chest for John to spread him open, and when John stills with just one finger a knuckle deep inside him, fucks his way back until John’s middle finger is buried deep within the twitching, slowly relaxing muscles. 

John adds a bit more lube, then slicks himself down and presses inside. Sherlock catches his breath, then gusts the air out, forcing his body to relax and John pushes deeper and deeper. When John finally bottoms out, he looks up from the left-over smear of chocolate on Sherlock’s ribs to his face, checking for any discomfort. Instead, he sees Sherlock, head thrown back and mouth open, lips stained with berry juice. His hands are still clenched tightly in his hair, as though by letting go this will somehow all end.

It’s sweet and touching and John’s earlier thoughts of Submissive Sherlock go racing across his mind. Sherlock sees the look on his face and manages a grin. “Next time,” he promises, then wiggles his hips in a circle, eyes sliding shut in bliss.

There’s not much left to do but what John does best. He pulls out and pushes back in, fitting their bodies tightly together. He traces Sherlock’s clavicle with his tongue and brushes his nipples again with his thumb, feeling the damp, frozen skin. His jeans are still on, caught between his hips and Sherlock’s ass, rough compared to smooth skin.

It’s been far too long, and it’s over far too soon. John shudders and comes hard, orgasm whiting out everything. When the world uprights, he leans back to see Sherlock panting, pupils still blown and pulse strong enough to show in the thin skin of his throat. John presses his lips to Sherlock’s, tastes the sweetness of the strawberries, then gently pulls out. Sherlock lets out an almost distressed moan.

“Easy, love,” John pushes his legs further apart. His come is leaking out, pearly white against the clear lubricant. Slowly, his fingers trace around damp, puckered skin, until Sherlock is gasping and pushing back against him. The juxtaposition of this Sherlock, so different from the cool and collected man that John usually knows, against the backdrop of this neat, orderly, scientific bedroom (after all, who else uses the periodic table as wall art?) is beautiful. John slips his fingers back inside, and closes his mouth over Sherlock’s cock. His fingers find that little gland and grind against it, and moments later Sherlock is arching off the bed again, and John is swallowing deep and hard.

After he’s finished, John presses another kiss to Sherlock’s lips and rises. He finds a flannel in the kitchen, dampens it, and proceeds to clean them both off, removing both semen and food. He untangles Sherlock’s hand from his head and sucks each one into his mouth before resting it across Sherlock’s stomach. Finally, he stretches out next to Sherlock’s limp form.

Sherlock blinks lazily up at the ceiling before turning over onto his side and pressing himself into John’s neck. The cuddling is new (usually, Sherlock preferred to be untouched after orgasm, to feel the blood as it rushed against his veins), but John’s not going to argue it. Instead, he leans his head back and sighs, feeling drowsy. “Wake me in twenty?” he asks, eyes slipping shut.

He can feel Sherlock smile against his neck. “Of course.”

**Author's Note:**

> Title inspired by "Who Needs Sleep?" By Barenaked Ladies


End file.
